Imagine a space so vast and empty it could make even the bravest astronaut feel a shiver down their spine. Well, that's the Bootes Void for you—a cosmic desert stretching across billions of light-years, devoid of the usual galaxies, stars, and cosmic clutter. It's like the ultimate black hole, but without the gravitational pull. Astronomers scratch their heads trying to fathom how such a void could exist in a universe teeming with celestial wonders. Some speculate it's a remnant from a cosmic collision, while others think it's just an oddity in the cosmic tapestry. Credit:
CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/:
ESO:
Barnard, https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Barnard_68.jpg
Eagle Nebula, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg IC 2944, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IC_2944,_Nicknamed_the_Running_Chicken_Nebula.jpg
The Very Large Telescope Snaps, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Very_Large_Telescope_Snaps_a_Stellar_Nursery_and_Celebrates_Fifteen_Years_of_Operations.jpg
Running Chicken Nebula: ESO/VPHAS+ team. Acknowledgement: CASU, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Running_Chicken_Nebula_-_Eso2320a.jpg
Ultra diffuse galaxy: Jordi Gallego, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ultra_diffuse_galaxy_DGSAT_I.jpg
NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI), and M. Barstow (University of Leicester)
NASA & JPL
NASA/ESA/Hubble
NASA, ESA, Andrew Fruchter (STScI), and the ERO team (STScI + ST-ECF)
NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
ESO/M. Kornmesser
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Cruz deWilde
NASA/ESA
Animation is created by Bright Side.
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Music by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com
Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV
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https://www.eastnews.ru
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For more videos and articles visit:
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CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/:
ESO:
Barnard, https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Barnard_68.jpg
Eagle Nebula, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_Nebula_from_ESO.jpg IC 2944, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IC_2944,_Nicknamed_the_Running_Chicken_Nebula.jpg
The Very Large Telescope Snaps, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Very_Large_Telescope_Snaps_a_Stellar_Nursery_and_Celebrates_Fifteen_Years_of_Operations.jpg
Running Chicken Nebula: ESO/VPHAS+ team. Acknowledgement: CASU, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Running_Chicken_Nebula_-_Eso2320a.jpg
Ultra diffuse galaxy: Jordi Gallego, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ultra_diffuse_galaxy_DGSAT_I.jpg
NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI), and M. Barstow (University of Leicester)
NASA & JPL
NASA/ESA/Hubble
NASA, ESA, Andrew Fruchter (STScI), and the ERO team (STScI + ST-ECF)
NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
ESO/M. Kornmesser
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Cruz deWilde
NASA/ESA
Animation is created by Bright Side.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com
Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV
Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightside
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en
Stock materials (photos, footages and other):
https://www.depositphotos.com
https://www.shutterstock.com
https://www.eastnews.ru
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For more videos and articles visit:
http://www.brightside.me
Category
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FunTranscript
00:00You get the last instructions from the team and get into your spaceship.
00:04It's the first spacecraft made on Earth that can move at a speed close to the speed of light.
00:10Your task is to visit the most unusual and terrifying places in space
00:15and send scientists detailed information about them.
00:19And so, your journey begins.
00:21Your spacecraft is accelerating and you dash past the Moon.
00:25In the distance, you see a small reddish planet.
00:28It's Mars!
00:29And look at that spectacular giant surrounded by a set of rings.
00:33That's Saturn!
00:35You wish you could have more time to explore this gas giant, but you have to hurry.
00:40You pass by beautiful stars.
00:42Some of them are luminous, others have a reddish hue, and some seem to be dimming.
00:48That's Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky on Earth.
00:52It's about 8.6 light-years away from us, but you're traveling fast,
00:57and soon you see Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, which is way further, 431 light-years away.
01:05Sometimes you manage to spot tiny dots circling these stars.
01:09Those are planets.
01:11And then, suddenly, you see nothing.
01:14At first, you're horrified.
01:17Something has gone wrong, and you've accidentally entered a black hole?
01:21Has your equipment malfunctioned?
01:23Because it seems that at a distance of 700 million light-years away from Earth, there's a hole.
01:30A blank void with no galaxies, stars, planets, or asteroids.
01:35You can't see anything.
01:37The void is a roughly spherical region of about 330 million light-years across.
01:43Our home Milky Way galaxy could fit in there billions of times over.
01:48And then, it dawns on you.
01:50What you're looking at is the mysterious Boötes Void.
01:54It lies about 700 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Boötes,
02:00the herdsman driving the plow around the North Pole.
02:04At first, this void was called the Great Nothing, but later it was given its current name.
02:10Now we know that galaxies look like a giant web.
02:14Most of them are parts of long structures called filaments.
02:18Those wind through the cosmos, and when they meet, they form regions with a high concentration of galaxies.
02:25These regions are what we know as galaxy clusters.
02:28But between these clusters and threads, there are ginormous empty voids that hardly contain any galaxies.
02:36Such voids actually make up almost 80% of the observable universe,
02:41and most of them are huge, from 30 to 300 million light-years wide.
02:47The Boötes Void is one of the most massive ones.
02:50It's even earned the title of Supervoid.
02:53Astronomers think it might be the result of a few smaller voids merging together.
02:59But what could have caused such giant empty areas to appear in the first place?
03:04The reason might lie in the origin of the universe.
03:08In its early days, all the matter in the universe was packed together quite tightly.
03:13Astronomers even think it was something like a uniform soup.
03:18But pretty soon, random quantum fluctuations started distributing this matter.
03:23Some areas became denser.
03:25As a result, their gravitational pull became stronger, and they began stealing matter from less dense regions.
03:33This made such areas even denser, and they kept attracting more and more matter.
03:39At the same time, smaller clumps of matter started drifting further away from the center, forming galaxies.
03:47After staring at nothingness for some time, you decide to explore other space objects and start the engine of your spacecraft again.
03:55There's one kind of space formation you've been looking forward to seeing.
03:59Nebulas.
04:01Those are gigantic clouds of gas and dust.
04:05With time, gravity starts to pull these clumps of dust and gas together.
04:10They grow larger and larger, and their gravity gets more powerful.
04:14Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
04:16One day, this mass becomes so big that it collapses under its own gravity and forms new stars.
04:23So, you decide to visit some of the most beautiful nebulas out there.
04:28And you start with the Butterfly Nebula.
04:31This butterfly's wingspan is more than three light-years.
04:35And the structure inside the nebula is one of the most complicated ever observed.
04:40The central star, a white dwarf, is heated to an incredible 450,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
04:48It means it was formed from a gargantuan star, likely more than five times the size of our Sun.
04:55The white dwarf is surrounded by a thick disk of dust and gas at the equator.
05:01That's what probably makes the whole structure look like an hourglass or a butterfly.
05:06The next place you decide to visit is the Eskimo Nebula,
05:105,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Gemini.
05:15It was discovered more than 200 years ago and got its name for a reason.
05:20Its double-shell formation looks like a person's face hidden in a padded hood of a winter jacket.
05:26But in reality, this parka is a disk of material with a ring of comet-shaped objects.
05:33And the tails of these objects stream away from the star at the center of the Eskimo Nebula.
05:39The bizarre orange streaks in the outer part of the cloud stretch light-years away in all directions.
05:46As for the Eskimo's face, even though it resembles a ball of twine,
05:51in reality, it's a bubble of material blown into space by the wind of high-speed material produced by the central star.
06:00Your next destination is the Ring Nebula.
06:04At first sight, it's a giant cloud of dust and gas surrounding an old, almost extinguished star, which does look like a ring.
06:14But astronomers say the nebula isn't a bagel, it's a jelly-filled donut.
06:19The deep-space colorful object more than 2,000 light-years away from Earth is actually a ring that wraps around a blue, ball-shaped structure.
06:29Each end of the structure sticks out of the ring's opposite sides.
06:33Now you can head to a place called the Pillars of Creation.
06:37You find it more than 7,000 light-years away from Earth in the Eagle Nebula.
06:43That's a young cluster of stars just 5.5 million years old, space babies.
06:49Once, the Hubble Space Telescope managed to take an image of several dark silhouettes near the nebula's center.
06:56And now you can see them with your own eyes.
07:00Those are the so-called Pillars of Creation, an active star-forming region.
07:06And since you've already visited a star-forming region, why don't you drop by a living fossil galaxy?
07:13For example, DGSat-1.
07:16It's as big as the Milky Way, but it's nearly invisible because its stars are spread out incredibly thinly.
07:24But what makes the galaxy so unique is that it's sitting all alone, unlike other galaxies of this kind, which are usually found in clusters.
07:33It can mean that DGSat-1 was formed in a different era, probably a mere 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
07:41If it's true, the galaxy is a real living fossil.
07:46The next stop on your space sightseeing tour is the Black Widow Pulsar.
07:51Just like its spider namesake, this rotating neutron star is munching on its partner, a lightweight brown dwarf star.
07:59The more material the pulsar consumes, the more slowly it spins.
08:04The energy the neutron star is losing in the process causes the companion star to dwindle.
08:10Oh, look at this! That's a stellar nursery in the constellation of Centaurus.
08:16But even though this place might be called nursery, it's anything but peaceful or safe.
08:22This region, made up of hydrogen and newborn stars, is located in a nebula in the constellation of Centaurus, around 6,500 light-years away from Earth.
08:33The intense energy these baby stars emit makes hydrogen clouds glow ominous red.
08:39This energy is so powerful that it's eating away dark clouds of dust, and they're disappearing like lumps of butter on a hot frying pan.
08:49You're continuing your journey when you see something absolutely amazing, a cloud of water floating in space.
08:56To be more precise, it's a cloud of water vapor surrounding a supermassive black hole 12 billion light-years away from Earth.
09:04The cloud contains 140 trillion times the entire volume of water on our planet.
09:11Astronomers believe this water cloud appeared just 1.6 billion years later than the universe itself.